Reading The Theatre

A Scene from Punchdrunk’s nonverbal adaptation of “Macbeth,” “Sleep No More&#8221

Lately, I’ve been leaving the theatre with a strange impulse: to retreat to a library cubicle and write an English paper. It’s probably because so many of New York’s theatre bills have begun to look like syllabi. In the past month, I’ve seen Jez Butterworth’s “Jerusalem,” a play that takes its title from the William Blake poem; Elevator Repair Service’s “The Select,” based on Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises,”; “Sleep No More,” Punchdrunk’s adaptation of “Macbeth,” and “War Horse,” the 2011 Tony winner for Best Play, which is based on Michael Morpurgo’s novel. At any given time, you can probably find a book-based Broadway musical to go to (“Wicked,” “Les Miserables,” “The Phantom of the Opera,” “South Pacific,” “Oliver!,” “Ragtime,” and “The Color Purple” are all based on novels), but it must be fairly unusual to have so many literature-inspired plays showing in the city at once.

Especially so many unusual plays. If there’s one thing that unites these offerings, it’s their willingness to experiment. “The Select” is essentially a whittled-down, word-for-word narration of the novel it’s based on, plus spontaneous bursts of choreographed dancing and out-of-synch sound effects (E.R.S. has used a similar approach in shows based on “The Great Gatsby” and “The Sound and the Fury”). “War Horse” uses life-size horse puppets to tell the story of a farm boy and his horse during the First World War—an idea Morpurgo initially thought sounded “like a joke.” And “Sleep No More” is less play than dance installation, occupying an abandoned hotel on West Twenty-seventh Street. Performers lead the audience through the hotel and “Macbeth” itself without uttering a single line of pentameter.

I’ve enjoyed the audience reaction to these plays almost as much as the plays themselves. People have seemed thrilled to see their favorite works broken down and reconstituted in odd ways. This is in marked difference to the reaction I’ve seen at some summer books-turned-movies. Coming out of Harry Potter and, later, “The Help,” I overheard people grumbling over slight textual deviations. That’s understandable: we’re all capable of becoming indignant at an unfaithful movie adaptation of a book whose story we feel ownership over. But it’s nice that people have embraced the experimentalism on display at the theatre, which seems to me to underline the essentially experimental nature of the novel—and of interpretation. The productions remind us that what we’re seeing on stage is not the only possible response to a book, and that our own imaginations have something essential to contribute. Watching them is almost like reading a novel: building a world along with the author and piecing it together to create an experience that’s ultimately our own.

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